


Alone with Grace

by stayliving



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 02:37:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayliving/pseuds/stayliving
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the ghosts in the walls no longer seem welcoming and they’ve given him the answer to every question he'd been too afraid to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alone with Grace

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a reply to a scent meme on Tumblr and it sort of snowballed on me.

It takes Isaac a couple of weeks after his father’s funeral to muster up enough courage to go back to his house — though he isn’t entirely sure he can call it that anymore, or if he ever really could. A house is entirely different from a home, he knows that, but even a house is supposed to protect you and make you feel safe; those are two feelings Isaac hadn’t experienced in such a long time and he wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had. 

The musk hits him like a wave the second he steps through the door and it crashes over him, threatening to pull him under. There’s a faint smell of blood, of fear, of anger still lingering in the air and it takes every ounce of strength the new Beta has to not succumb to it — it’s when he first realizes the memories of his father are his anchor. The need to shift, to let his wolf out of his cage is almost too much for him to bare, but he controls it for the first time since Derek bit him. Isaac talks himself down, too afraid of losing control, the memories of the freezer just a few steps away from him enough to keep him literally frozen in place.

Isaac isn’t sure how long he remains there in the doorway, his back pressed flat against the door as he tries to get a hold on his surroundings. Before coming, he’d tried talking himself out of it because he had known nothing good was going to come from this, not when the wounds were still fresh and barely had enough time to heal and scar over. But self control is something he has very little of, or maybe he just doesn’t have the strength to leave well enough alone.

Either way, it takes him ten, fifteen, twenty minutes for his legs to start working again and, at first, he wanders aimlessly through the house, his fingertips leaving streaks in the dust that had settled in the weeks since the house had seen life. He doesn’t know what he wanted to accomplish by coming back; he doesn’t know what answers he’d been hoping to find, but the ghosts in the walls aren’t offering to give him any and he’s too afraid to ask.

His heartbeat quickens when he finds himself in front of what used to be his parents’ room. He hasn’t been in there since before his mom died nearly seven years ago; his dad never let him in, and after a while, he’d learned to stop asking. Every bone in his body is yelling at him to turn around, to make a run back towards the front door and forget that he’d ever had the idea to come back, but his feet are rooted in place and it would take the roof crumbling down around him to get him to pick them up off the floor.

His hand shakes as he reaches forward to touch the doorknob and he has to swallow a few times for air to get past the lump that had formed in the back of his throat. His eyes sting and he has every single intention of blaming it on the dust he’d just stirred up. The knob turns easily in his much-too-sweaty palm and the door flies open in front of him and everything — all the memories he’d been trying to surpress over the past few years — everything comes back to him at once and suddenly Isaac’s not capable of breathing anymore and he has no idea how he manages to stay upright. He looks down and he realizes the knob is no longer attached to the door and he doesn’t remember pulling on it hard enough to break it.

He tosses it off to the side and slowly takes one step into the bedroom. The stinging behind his eyes is getting worse and he isn’t sure he can even blame it on the dust anymore as he wipes the back of his hand across his face. Isaac takes a huge, gulping breath to steady himself before pushing the rest of the way in.

The bedroom is just like how he remembered it being from when he was younger — except it has a few more holes in the walls, and he tries not to let his mind linger on them for too long because he’s quickly losing his ability to breathe and thinking about them will only manage to make it worse. Once he’s inside, he doesn’t really know what to do with himself. He still isn’t getting any answers for the questions he doesn’t even know how to ask and it hurts — hurts worse than anything he’s ever experienced in his life. He wasn’t expecting to find his mom here (he wasn’t expecting to find anything here, really), but seeing how empty and broken and lonely his childhood home has become leaves little room for him to have any expectations about his own life.

He moves to the dresser and looks at the few remaining pictures, their frames broken and filthy. He wipes the sleeve of his hoodie over them to try to get the dust out of the cracks, his eyes welling up when he sees a picture of the four of them together – Camden, his mom, his father, and himself – from one of the few vacations he remembers taking when he was only six years old, just a few short years before everything in his life turned to complete shit. He carefully removes the picture from the frame, avoiding the broken glass even though he knows it can’t hurt him too badly now that he has the ability to heal. Isaac studies the picture in his hands and, for a moment, he wans to keep it the way it is, but his hands work on their own accord as he starts tearing his father out of the picture – literally and figuratively. For just a moment, he can pretend that this is how his life turned out. For a moment, he can imagine his life being completely different.

His mom would have left his dad before his drinking started spinning wildly out of control and before he got the chance to show off the beast laying dormant within him. Camden never would’ve had to join the Army as a means to get out of Beacon Hills, to escape the shit life he’d been dealt (he would’ve never left Isaac alone to deal with his father’s demons by himself). They would have been happy, together. Alive. 

A bubble of nausea forms in the pit of Isaac’s stomach and he has to shove the torn picture into the pocket of his hoodie to keep the lunch he’d eaten down. His eyes scan over the room and, honestly, there isn’t much to see, and he’s contemplating just heading off back to his old room to gather some of the shit he hadn’t had the chance of bringing with him yet. Until his eyes landed on the closet and his feet automatically moved forward, his hands pushing the doors open without him having to think twice about it.  
The clothes — his mother’s clothes. His father’s shirts were strewn haphazardly around the room and on the dresser, but here… Here, everything was meticulously hung as though their owner would soon return. But she wasn’t. She was never coming back. 

Then the smell hits him and it nearly knocks him over — mildew, must, something sour and pungent hanging in the air and before he knows what’s happening, he’s bent over, spilling the contents of his stomach out onto the floor. He retches and he’s crying and he doesn’t even try to make excuses for it anymore, because this is it — this is all he has left of his mom, and his father hadn’t even bothered to take care of it and as soon as he’s finished throwing up, he grabs the clothes off the hanger, as much as he can manage to hold on one arm. 

The smell grows even stronger and it’s like a punch to his gut. Isaac stumbles over the to bed and throws the pile of clothes in his arms on top of it and — honestly, he doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s doing anymore, but he never did have a fucking clue to begin with — and, just like he did when he was younger and he’d had a nightmare, he climbs in beside his mom (the memory of his mom) and curls up around her, pulling her clothes against his chest. He’s flat out sobbing by now and his entire being feels like it’s being shattered and put back together the wrong way. There are pieces of him missing and he’s never going to be a completed puzzle and he’s always going to be this scared, damaged little kid, no matter how much Derek tries to tell him that the bite had been a gift.

He presses his face down into the pile of clothes and closes his eyes and the smell doesn’t bother him that much anymore, but he’s shaking with his sobs and everything he’d been trying to keep in over the past six years comes pouring out of him and he doesn’t know how to stop it or how to even begin stopping it. He tries to imagine that he’s still six years old, and his mom is still beside him on the bed, and she’s whispering words of encouragement into the top of his hair as her hand rubs small circles into his back.

He falls asleep like that and he dreams of her — she tells him all the words he’s been dying to hear since she’d left him to fend for himself — and he’s confused when he wakes up alone on a pile of clothes a couple of hours later and it takes him a minute to remember that his mom is still gone and his life is still shit and everything hits him all at once. Isaac darts out of the house like a bat out of fucking hell and he doesn’t know where he’s going to go — he doesn’t want to go back to Derek’s, can’t go back to Derek’s right now -- but he knows that he can’t stay in that godforsaken house any longer; the ghosts in the walls no longer seem welcoming and they’ve given him the answer to every question he'd been too afraid to ask.

He hadn’t been searching for closure, so he’s not disappointed that they hadn't offered him any.


End file.
